Fiskars Project Orange Thumb Grant!

Good news!

The BioWorks Butterfly Garden at MOSI has received a Project Orange Thumb Grant from Fiskars and will be planting nine themed gardens in the MOSI Historic Tree Grove the week of Earth Day!

MOSI’s Orange Thumb Project:
MOSI’s Richard T. Bowers Historic Tree Grove provides museum visitors with a historic stroll through time by focusing on the stories of 17 trees that are descendants of trees associated with famous and historic people and places of America. The goal of this project is to begin the planting of 9 specific garden areas that will expand upon the interpretation of the historic significance of each tree and enhance the visitor experience in this green area.

The 9 garden spaces that will be created in this project are:

• Ray Charles Live Oak: A Sensory Garden to encourage the use of non-sight senses, specifically touch and smell, to experience a garden in a way similar to someone who is blind.


• Moon Sycamore: Moon Garden will focus upon plants that best reflect moonlight or bloom at night.


• Clara Barton Red Bud: Medicinal Garden to highlight plants from which medicine is derived or plants with healing properties.


• Frank Lloyd Wright Ginko: Jurassic Garden will focus on fossil plants which, like the Ginko, have lived since the time of the dinosaurs.


• Olustee Longleaf Pine: Flatwoods Garden will highlight native plants of the Florida Flatwoods ecosystem community similar to those that would have been found at the site of the Civil War Battle of Olustee.


• George Washington Carver Persimmon: Edible Garden will focus upon edible plants including several flowering varieties of Carver’s favorite plant, the peanut.


• Wright Brothers Sweet Gum: Air Plant Garden will focus on plants that can live above the soil, like orchids and tillandsias.


• Fort Matanzas Red Ceder: Native Garden will focus upon plants native to Florida that would have been found by our original settlers.


• Juliette Gordon Lowe: Rose Garden will highlight several species of beautiful roses in honor of the founder of the Girl Scouts.

Through these plantings this Earth Day week, we hope to increase awareness of gardening and the Historic Tree Grove at MOSI while interpreting these trees in a unique way.

Volunteers!
MOSI is seeking volunteers to assist with these awesome plantings! We will be planting three gardens each day over April 22nd, 23rd and 24th from 9:30am until 2pm. Volunteers will be assembled into three teams each day and each team will work on the planting of one thematic garden. To pre-register yourself or a whole team (up to 10 people) for these plantings please contact Kristen Gilpin at MOSI.

Kristen Gilpin
BioWorks Butterfly Garden @ MOSI
kristeng@mosi.org
(813)987-6357

Volunteers will receive a free pass for the MOSI permanent exhibits so they can come back on another day and enjoy the museum.

About Fiskars Project Orange Thumb:
Started in 2003, Project Orange Thumb is a grant program that provides community garden groups with the tools and materials they need to reach their goals for neighborhood beautification and horticulture education. Marking its 6th successful year in 2008, Project Orange ThumbSM has provided over 100 community groups with over $200,000 to create and develop their own special community gardens. These included projects geared toward community involvement, neighborhood beautification, sustainable agriculture and/or horticultural education.
Learn more about Project Orange Thumb here.

How Gardening Makes Us Feel:
The Fiskars Project Orange Thumb Grant application asked that we create a presentation about how gardening makes us feel here at MOSI. With the help of an amazing student filmmaker and a young actor here is our answer to that question: Flower = Smile

Thanks Fiskars! This is going to be a great project!